Terrorism, "The War on Terror" and the Message
of Carnage

When the French government suggested
a diplomatic initiative that might interfere with the White
House agenda for war, the president responded by saying that
the proposed scenario would "ratify terror." The date was
July 24, 1964, the president was Lyndon Johnson and the war
was in Vietnam.

Four decades later, the anti-terror
rationale is not just another argument for revving up the US
war machinery. Fighting "terror" is now the central
rationale for war.

"The contrast couldn’t be clearer
between the intentions and the hearts of those who care
deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who
kill, those who’ve got such evil in their hearts that they
will take the lives of innocent folks," President Bush said
Thursday after the London bombings. "The war on terror goes
on."

A key requirement of this righteous war is that all
inconvenient history must be deemed irrelevant. "By
accepting the facile cliche that the battle under way
against terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily
branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like
them, refuse to acknowledge our own culpability," journalist
Chris Hedges has observed. "We ignore real injustices that
have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and
despair."

In the aftermath of 9/11, writer Joan Didion
critiqued "the wearying enthusiasm for excoriating anyone
who suggested that it could be useful to bring at least a
minimal degree of historical reference to bear on the
event." Overwhelmingly, politicians and pundits were quick
to get in a groove of condemning any sensible assertions
"that events have histories, political life has
consequences, and the people who led this country and the
people who wrote and spoke about the way this country was
led were guilty of trying to infantilize its citizens if
they continued to pretend otherwise."

Voices of reason,
even when they’ve come from within the country’s military
establishment, have been shunted aside. In late November
2002, a retired US Army general, William Odom, told C-SPAN
viewers: "Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated.
It’s a tactic. It’s about as sensible to say we declare war
on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war.
We’re not going to win the war on terrorism. And it does
whip up fear. Acts of terror have never brought down liberal
democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few."

Two
years after 9/11, Norman Mailer asked: "What does it profit
us if we gain extreme security and lose our democracy? Not
everyone in Iraq, after all, was getting their hands and/or
their ears cut off by Saddam Hussein. In the middle of that
society were hordes of Iraqis who had all the security they
needed even if there was no freedom other than the
full-fledged liberty offered by dictators to be free to
speak with hyperbolic hosannas for the leader. So, yes,
there are more important things to safeguard than security
and one of them is to protect the much-beleaguered integrity
of our democracy. The final question in these matters
suggests itself. Can leaders who lie as a way of life
protect any way of life?"

The president who lied his way
into an invasion of Iraq is now exploiting Thursday’s
atrocities in London to justify US policies that are
bringing daily atrocities to Iraq. Bush is intent on sending
a message to "the terrorists" by continuing the Pentagon’s
war effort.

The idea of communicating by killing is very
familiar. There’s nothing new about claiming to send a
righteous message with bullets and bombs.

In his book
"War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," former war
correspondent Chris Hedges writes that he saw such
transmissions up close: "Corpses in wartime often deliver
messages. The death squads in El Salvador dumped three
bodies in the parking lot of the Camino Real Hotel in San
Salvador, where the journalists were based, early one
morning. Death threats against us were stuffed in the mouths
of the bodies." Hedges adds: "And, on a larger scale,
Washington uses murder and corpses to transmit its wrath. We
delivered such incendiary messages in Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia,
and Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden has learned to speak the
language of modern industrial warfare."

And Hedges notes:
"It was Robert McNamara, the American Secretary of Defense
in the summer of 1965, who defined the bombing raids that
would eventually leave hundreds of thousands of civilians
north of Saigon dead as a means of communication to the
Communist regime in Hanoi."

Forty years later, with a
"war on terrorism" serving as the central theme of pro-war
propaganda, the United States and its military allies are
routinely sending lethal messages. It should not surprise us
when such messages are returned to sender.

*************

This
article is adapted from Norman Solomon’s new book War Made
Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Book excerpts are posted at: WarMadeEasy.com.

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